Event

"A Map of the Ocean's Floor" is a new play by Jessica Lewis. A coming of age story through a jazz lens, set in New York City in the late 1970s, at the end of the bohemia that had been created in the previous years by Beat Generation. The play explores themes of disillusionment and the changing times, and how that was affecting the practices of musicians, writers, and artists, who had been involved with, or inspired by the Beat Generation. The play itself uses the multi-disciplinary approach of the Beat Generation by combining music, theater, spoken word, and movement to create a new work of theater that is experimental, while remaining heavily grounded in the traditions of realism, naturalism, and the collaborative works that came out of the Beat scene itself. "A Map of the Ocean's Floor" pays homage to the Beat Generation, while depicting the end of an era.

Jessica Lewis, writes a play heavily influenced by the music and poetry of the Beat Generation, by combining all of these genres to create a work that attempts at defying classical genres of theater. By combing jazz music, spoken word poetry, live theater, history, and dance, she tells the story of a young woman who looses her sense of "reality," while getting swept up in the romanticism and nostalgia of the end of Bohemia, as it had previously been known.

Through this play we see how the music and words of the Beat Generation moved and inspired so many around it, but also how it enabled a whole generation after to get lost in a world of excess and unrealistic views of what it meant to be an artist.

A love of the music and the language of poetry, as an expression of what jazz musicians were doing with their music at the time was what the Beat Generation was attempting to do. "A Map of the Ocean's Floor", we see how these ideas and objectives got misconstrued by many who were in search of something "real," and of a "real artists life," and how this distance from reality has impacted youth from all generations.